I once taught a girl whose laughter made me think of falling water on stones. I recall the sound of it as clearly as I recall how often and how willingly she told me jokes. On the day her friends left on a trip, I asked her, ‘Priskilla, why didn’t you go to Bali?’ She said, ‘Ma’am, my purse was khaali.’
Among the many gifts that the classroom throws in my face, one that I am equally envious and enamored by is the beehive of female friendships all around me.
I once had a student who didn’t speak much and said only what she wanted to say and even then, very little. She wasn’t shy or afraid to speak. She was just so careful with words that she refused to speak until she knew exactly what she wanted to say.
In Konkani, we use the expression ‘she walked the city so much, she turned it to powder.’ Our mothers said it to shame us for bunking college, sitting behind some guy on his bike and roaming the city.
